How does immunotherapy work immune system is made up of your white blood cells, organs and tissues. It fights germs and disease, including cancer. Immunotherapy uses drugs and other substances to boost your own immune system or target things that interfere with it. This article focuses on immunotherapy to treat cancer.
How does immunotherapy work?
Your body has proteins on the surface of cells that help regulate your immune response. These proteins act as “on/off switches” to signal T cells to attack or not. Cancer cells can use these signals to escape your immune system. Immunotherapy drugs can block these proteins or directly activate your T cells to destroy cancer cells.
Some of these medicines are called checkpoint inhibitors. They block normal proteins, such as PD-1 or PD-L1, on your immune cells that normally signal them to stop attacking cancer cells. The FDA has approved these drugs to treat cancers that spread or come back after other treatments, such as lung and kidney cancer.
Other immunotherapy targets your own immune cells. These include chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy and tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy. These treatments collect immune cells from your body and modify them in a lab to attack cancer cells. They are used to treat melanoma that has spread, as well as kidney cancer and a type of non-small cell lung cancer that has not responded to chemotherapy.
Some immunotherapies are given by mouth or into a vein (IV). Others are injected into the bladder, such as the vaccine for melanoma and a treatment for early skin cancer. Other types are given in cycles, with periods of treatment followed by a rest period to give your body time to make new healthy cells.
